4 kids missing in boat mishap

COTABATO CITY — Four children, two of them pre-schoolers, have been missing since noontime yesterday after a motorized banca, full of schoolchildren, capsized while crossing a 200-meter wide river.

Until press time, divers of the Army’s anti-crime Task Force Tugis, the city government’s Emergency and Rescue Unit and the 6th Marine Battalion Landing Team have been searching for three-year-old twins Al-Hamji and Al-Nadji Langeban and their older sisters Shereen and Bai Dayang, in the murky Tamontaka River.

Datu Madali Wampa, barangay chairman of Tamontaka, said the children were on their way to school on board a motorized banca operated by their policeman-father, PO1 Emlan Langeban, when the rivercraft sank.

"It was just fortunate that the other children knew how to swim so some of them remained afloat until the rescuers arrived," Wampa said in the dialect. — John Unson